Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Recently, I revamped my old Organization Chart javascript widget to a new version. Since I released this code some time ago I received quite a good deal of email requests from people that are actually using it for their company's intranet site.

On the one hand, it makes me very happy to see people are actually using it for professional purposes. On the other hand, at the time I slapped it together in a few hours total, building on some old experience. As it turned out, users were/are having quite some issues to properly customize their organization charts. I even received some code contributions to improve the functionality.

Now, a few days ago, I finally found some time to address the major issues. But something grave changed in the mean while. When I first created and released the widget, I was a windows user, and used to create stuff that would work on Microsoft Internet Explorer, and then modify it to work on Mozilla/Firefox. Now, it has been about a year since I replaced Microsoft Windows for (K)Ubuntu Linux. Meaning, I am without Internet Explorer....or am I ;)

One of the compelling things about the IE4Linux project is that it allows you to run several versions of MS Internet Explorer on the same machine - something I never got to work on my native windows machine.

Obviously, web developers that need to test their pages on several browsers and browser versions are better off on Linux + Wine than native Windows, as Linux + Wine + IEs4Linux allows them to test their pages on several versions of Internet Explorer.

What can I say...the title of the blog is a bit tongue in cheek as far as I am concerned ;)

I am no hardcore webdeveloper but I was quite heavily involved in intranet application development, and at the time I struggled a lot with testing different IE versions. One of decisive momemnts was when I installed a IE7 beta only to find out that a lot of stuff would not work anymore.

Yeah, I see your point. That said, it is amazing to see how well wine runs other apps. So I tend to trust it at least while developing. But I agree, the final test should always be as close as possible to the actual environment.

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About Me

I'm Roland Bouman (@rolandbouman on twitter). I'm a software (web) application developer and I work on both the front end as well as the back end. I do data modeling, database design, ETL, Analytics, and Business Intelligence.